This week I posted an updated ranking of the top 25 prospects in the minors and my second mock draft for 2015. I also held yet another Klawchat this week, still focusing on the draft.
And now, this week’s links… 
- A bipartisan editorial from Newt Gingrich and Van Jones calling for better treatment options for mentally ill nonviolent criminals. I couldn’t agree with this any more.
- Twitter finally grew a spine and banned serial rules violator Chuck C. Johnson, who outed a rape victim and still was allowed to remain on the service.
- Kansas has become a real political backwater, with their latest stunt the paternalistic $25 daily limit on welfare recipients’ withdrawals. The legislators supporting this awful law cite anecdotal evidence of waste rather than relying on research that gives the contrary conclusion.
- If you can’t accept the reality of climate change, perhaps the fear of the extinction of coffee will get to you? That BBC piece details some of the efforts to breed hardier coffee plants that can adapt to a warming planet.
- Still in denial? How about the loss of so much ice in Antarctica that it may be shifting the Earth’s gravitational field?
- Bill Gates talked to Vox about the inevitable global flu pandemic, with a lot of additional reporting on the how, why, and maybe what we can do about it.
- A funny take on helicopter versus free range parenting.
- A fair question on why there isn’t more media coverage of Atlanta Hawks guard Thabo Sefolosha missing the playoffs because he was attacked by NYPD officers. You’d think an assault on a famous person of color would at least get the media’s attention.
- Longread of the week: Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto
(which I reviewed) and Being Mortal
(which I haven’t read), writes about the plague of unnecessary medical care in America. There are a lot of expensive tests, procedures, and medications with little to no proven benefit (or a proven lack of benefit) that are routinely administered to patients in the U.S., and we all end up paying for them in our insurance premiums.
Chuck C Johnson outed a rape victim? He’s a total scumbag, but not sure when he did that. If you’re talking about the University of Virginia thing, it’s worth noting that she’s, uh, not a rape victim.
Doesn’t mean she should have been doxxed, but you know, it was all made up.
His intent from the start was to out a rape victim, and at the time, she was still widely believed to be a valid victim.
For accuracy’s sake, Johnson did post a picture of a rape victim and falsely claim it was “Jackie” from the UVA story: http://bit.ly/1CbwPf8.
as I recall, he “outed” her after Rolling Stone published their first half-retraction. By that point it seemed clear that the story was false.
Here’s one post (among dozens I found just now) from that period that makes it clear that at the time of the “outing” it was far from clear that “Jackie” had lied about anything. (It’s hardly unusual for a victim of traumatic assault to suffer from false memories, to tell inconsistent versions of the story, or to fabricate aspects of the story after the fact.)
that wonkette piece is dated December 8th. The story fell apart with the T. Rees Shapiro article in WaPo on December 5th (the same day Rolling Stone first admitted the story was doubtful).
Did you read the Wonkette piece?
Keith law won’t respond. I thought Keith law as against false narratives?
Keith Law has a life other than this blog, and doesn’t respond to comments as soon as they’re posted.
So Keith has become a global warming alarmist. He always was preoccupied with vanity.
You should be alarmed about climate change, and what it means for our future.
In addition to the valid claims of sports media timidity with regards to the Sefolosha situation, there’s also the problem of lack of adequate resources to cover the story by the outlet seemingly most incentivized to do so, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Reporting a story that would require bucking up against the intransigence of an organization like the NYPD is beyond the pay grade of local sports reporters, so the only way for a daily to do it right would be to send a news reporter or two to New York for an extended period of time. And while there may have been a day when the AJC could have done exactly that, those days are surely gone.
It’s also surprising Keith still refers to the infamous “Jackie” as a rape victim. It’s a crime in Virginia to make false rape accusations. Jackie’s story fell apart completely. She, and Rolling Stone, set back future rape victims quite a bit. As moronic as Chuck Johnson is, Rolling Stone’s piece on Jackie, they have since fully retracted was worse.
Happy early B-Day!
If what Dave Zirin says in the Sefolosha article is true, that E:60 and Outside The Lines haven’t had a long piece on the story yet, that would be disappointing. Those programs are purely news programs, and have certainly tackled difficult and newsworthy stories such as this in the past. SportsCenter may not have the time in 60 minutes to devote to a story like this that would require probably 15-20 minutes to examine all the angles (though today, they are devoting time to reporting on homelessness with two St. Louis Rams). I also don’t really see the angle that because it is the Hawks involved, and not a more popular team, as the reason this hasn’t been covered more nationally. I can remember back in January that the Hawks received a lot of publicity when they had the best record in the NBA.
Thanks!
http://thefederalist.com/2015/04/17/what-it-would-take-to-prove-global-warming/
That’s all.
Tracinski plays a lot of games with words in there, but he’s weak on the actual science (something he’s done before). Rather than linking an op ed, however, why not link some peer-reviewed research that contradicts the claims of the scientists who argue that human activity is warming the planet?
I heard the NBAPA specifically asked players not to speak out about Thabo because they’re prepping for a lawsuit against the NYPD et al. So if Thabo and his representatives are intentionally avoiding making an issue in the media about it, that might explain the dearth of reporting. Of course, reporters aren’t bound by any of that and we can question the journalistic ethics of not pursuing a story so that its subject can prepare a lawsuit, but it is possible that the lawsuit will be more effective than any report/story.